The university teacher Claire Duchen, who has died of cancer aged 45, wrote lucidly and sympathetically on modern French feminism, and was central to a global network of feminist scholars, as a writer, translator, research co-ordinator and regional editor for the Women's Studies International Forum.

Her book Feminism In France From May 68 To Mitterrand (1986), written as a "participant observer", continues to inspire students because it so successfully links what might seem fancy theory and the everyday lives of ordinary women. French Connections (1987), her brilliant little book of translated texts, showed the full range of French feminist thought.

Claire was born in London to South African parents, Myra and Leo Duchen. When she was five, her father became professor of neuro-pathology at the institute of neurology, Queen Square, and the family moved permanently to England. She was educated at North London Collegiate School and read French at Sussex University. Her 1983 doctoral thesis, on contemporary feminist thought, was the first granted by the institute of French studies at New York University. She came to think the thesis subject had chosen her, it was her own way of making the personal political.

After teaching briefly at Aston University and Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), Claire took a post at Bath University, where she wrote another book, Women's Rights, Women's Lives In France 1944-1968 (published in 1994), and helped set up a research centre for women's studies. In 1993, she took a senior post at Sussex University, but her years there were clouded, first by the illness and death of her parents, and then by being diagnosed herself with advanced ovarian cancer in 1996.

Claire confronted her illness with honesty and determination. Cancer was, she said, "like being on a wobbly bicycle", and she undertook high-dose chemotherapy in order to stay on the road as long as possible. During the last four years, she continued to work, and co-edited When The War Was Over, a book on women in postwar Europe, which reached proof stage just before her death.

Claire never lost her feminism; she thought it should be rooted both in rigorous thinking and human solidarity, but recently wrote an article in which she explained that her interests had gone beyond French culture and she was drawn to people "on the margins", wrestling with conflict, hardship and taboos. Her last article was about women who had their heads shaved after the liberation of France for being wartime collaborators.

Claire loved it when students spoofed her strongly-held views, but she also inspired many of them to work in her field, She liked having fun. She travelled widely, wove wool on the loom in the spare room, and through her partner, the musician Ben Mandelson, knew other musicians and performers, to whom she introduced her international circle of friends. You never knew who you might meet in the house in Finsbury Park, north London.

She insisted that her funeral should not be too sombre and should be conducted by a woman rabbi. Ben, and her brother and sister, survive her.